Derek Potter
- 509
- 37
A. Neumaier said:In a damped harmonic oscillator, the complex-valued frequency has a nonzero real and imaginary part.
Nice post-editing :)A. Neumaier said:The real observables are the points on the oscillating curve; the observable complex frequency is extracted from these and produces the physical way of summarizing the behavior of the oscillator.
It is always the summary that carries the physics. Without summarizing what happens in Nature we cannot form a single concept. Every observable is an abstraction of the real thing, and as an abstraction it may be a real number, a complex number, or an even more complicated object such as a vector or a tensor.
Sure, that's what I said, the real variable is a projection of the complex representation.
I am surprised that nobody else seems to be interested in whether the idea of complex observables makes sense physically. You and I are clearly not going to agree about that so we must agree to differ.